Vulnerable care home residents are treated like “brutes or malfunctioning
machines”, said Hilary Mantel, the author, as she spoke of the “utterly
depressing” search to find accommodation for a disabled friend.

At best, said the double Booker prize-winning novelist, those who lived in homes were patronised by staff who spoke in “the doting tones we use with babies”, while at worst they were handled as “machines”.

After looking at a number of homes that were either “excruciatingly expensive” or “utterly depressing”, she spoke of a serious flaws in the system.

“We didn’t see anywhere dirty, but we saw places that were utterly depressing,” she told a Sunday newspaper. “Behind august frontages, Edwardian houses degenerated into tiny passages, narrowed further by dumped food trolleys and filing cabinets.

“Manicured gardens and coastal views — all costed out in the monthly bill — were accessible only to visitors and the spryest of residents, while those in wheelchairs could gaze at the wall.”

Mantel, 60, who worked in a geriatric hospital in the 1970s, undertook a “private task” in January to assist the unnamed friend, who is in her 60s, physically disabled and in need to round-the-clock care. Together, they searched for suitable accommodation.

In one “excruciatingly expensive” home, they came across a “wet room” containing a mop, bucket and disinfectant. “This display said, plainly, 'It would be easier if we just hosed you down,’ ” said Mantel.

Even once she was settled in a “bright, cheerful” home, the author said her friend was treated so poorly she was forced to remind a member of staff that she was a “resident not a prisoner”.

Mantel said the experience had made her more aware of the “disability agenda” and her good fortune to be able to walk across a room or sign her name. “In the worst homes, the clients are dealt with as if they are brutes, or malfunctioning machines; in the best, they are spoken to in the doting tones we use with babies,” she told the Sunday Times Magazine.

“Nobody should place the whole blame on scarcity of resources; that would be too complacent.

“All the money in the world cannot remedy failure of imagination.”

Mantel noted that standards were “far higher” than in the 1970s, when institutions and care homes were “heart-rending”.

She acknowledged the publicity that surrounded cases where residents were “grossly violated” but added: “With old age and disability it is the daily, unspectacular reality that poses a challenge.”

Last month, the Care and Quality Commission reported that a growing number of pensioners with dementia were being denied help to eat and drink, robbed of their privacy and treated “as if they were not there”.

David Behan, its chief executive, said finances were not solely responsible for the flaws, with staff also being badly trained and “poorly deployed”, and treating their patients as a list of “tasks” rather than individuals.